FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT BLACK FOREST - PAGE 2

German cuisine as we have known it: bratwurst, sauerkraut, boiled potatos and beer. German cuisine as we may come to know it: medallions of venison with juniperberry sauce, reisling soup with oysters, parfait of smoked eel and wine. German chefs Albert Kellner and Josef Viehhauser visited Chicago recently for two events promoting less familiar styles of German cooking. Kellner, 46, executive chef at Brenner's Park Hotel, in Baden-Baden, West Germany, is preparing Black Forest regional cuisine at Marshall Field's State Street store through Friday for an Edelweiss promotion.

It was Oktoberfest in February last weekend at Shepard High School in Palos Heights. Highlights of the 15th annual "A Little Bit of Germany" event included an oompah band, German slap dancing, sausage eating and a Miss German Shepard contest. Guests were made to feel willkommen through the efforts of Nellie Hastings and her German Club, comprising 78 students from her German classes. Hastings, who has taught at Shepard for 18 years, said: "All of the proceeds from our evening (a total of $2,400)

Americans get the shortest vacations in the industrial world. With so little time, the pressure is on to make all the right choices when planning a trip. But how to select the right destination? It ultimately depends on your interests and your tastes -- and what your experienced travel writer tells you. It's my job to sort through all the travel-industry superlatives and "top ten" lists. Readers naturally want to know the best, but it's just as important to know the worst. With that in mind, I've pulled together a round robin of my candid opinions on the best and worst European destinations.

I had crossed Bavaria five times before, without seeing it once--the effect of careening at nearly 90 miles an hour along the Autobahn between Munich and resorts in the Austrian Alps. Now, as I sat down with a map, I intended to plot a leisurely, longitundinal path from west east along the spine of dark-wooded, crag-strewn Bavaria. My work had been done for me. The Deutsche Alpenstrasse, or German Alpine Road, winds its many-cornered way from Lindau on Lake Constance to Berchtesgaden in the southeast corner of Germany.

Heinz has been serving German and Austrian specialties in his Morton Grove restaurant for 16 years, but he's not planning an Oktoberfest celebration this month. "I don't want to compete with the Greek Orthodox church down the street," he says with a smile. If Oktoberfest has become to restaurateurs what St. Patrick's Day is to politicians, the Austrian-born chef wants none of it for his restaurant. Instead, he's throwing a jaegerfest, or hunter's festival, through Oct. 27. Although it sounds like merely a matter of semantics, there is a big difference in the menu at the Black Forest Chalet.

The A Frames' tunefully cacophonous blend of primitive drumming, thuggish bass lines and discordant, blues-tinged guitars owes an enormous debt to Nick Cave's old band, the Birthday Party. But where that combo was preoccupied with sin and self-destruction, and took itself terribly seriously, this Seattle-based trio's own dystopian vision is at once more universal and leavened with humor. Guitarist Erin Sullivan delivers bleak lyrics about life and death after a nuclear holocaust in robotic cadences; the effect is of a black joke told with a very straight face.

Polished faces gleam from every corner of the room, yet the only sound inside this Elgin shop is a soft ticking. Keith Krantz, owner of the American Black Forest Clock Company, says he used to keep several of the clocks in his shop wound up, but "it was too noisy." He uses the quiet moments in the shop to finish repairs on clocks or watches, or to demonstrate the chimes of a particular favorite for a customer. Krantz bought the shop in 1989 from his father, who started the business in 1954.

Here's a chance to save the price of a plane ticket to Bavaria. Just walk into the Black Forest Restaurant in Hoffman Estates to enjoy a genuine German adventure. As you enter the storefront chalet, you`ll hear taped oompah music and smell savory home cooking. You`ll see shelves stocked with imported Old World treasures like cuckoo clocks, steins, plates, candles and traditional holiday gifts. Then, moving past displays of imported canned foods, candies, 30 different German wines and more than 66 imported beers, you`ll stand in front of a delicatessen case chock full of sausages, cheeses and freshly made salads.

Envision a medieval fortress, a bright river flowing beside it. An old European town will soon be completed on the opposite bank. A castle rises in the background. These postcard scenes are taking shape on a huge wall in Lincoln Square, where two artists and some high school students are transforming 2,800 square feet of gray into a sprawling German countryside. In two weeks, the mural on the concrete canvas at 4662 N. Lincoln Ave. will be complete. "We`re doing a community-development project," said Fred Montano, director of City at Work, a new program that will use high school students to transform bare walls into murals throughout the city.

Q. I look forward to eating Black Forest cake on special occasions. I was wondering if you would consider developing a light version of this wonderful, colorful cake. A. A chocolate cake soaked with cherry liqueur, layered with cherry filling, and all wrapped up in a blanket of whipped cream? Yes, I believe I would consider taking on this dessert. I searched the Internet for various recipes for Black Forest cake and decided to take what I liked from each of them: One recipe used a 13-by-9-inch pan instead of round cake pans; another used strong coffee and buttermilk; I used a devil's food cake mix and used coffee instead of water and buttermilk instead of the 1/2 cup of oil. Yet another recipe blended the cherry-pie filling with the cherry liqueur instead of soaking the cake with it, so I decided to try this technique.